 Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer and I'm gonna be your instructor for this course. Over the last 30 some years, I've been working in some field of information technology. Whether it was with mainframe systems, operating the old dumb terminals back in those days, to the fledglings of Microsoft back when all they had was DOS to Windows from all varieties, you know, from going through 95, well, well before that with Windows 3.1, but then 95 and then ME and all the rest, all the way up into our current technologies. I've done a lot of work in the virtual environment with Hyper-V and with some other competitor products. I've done a lot of work in the security field over this time as well. So I hope that as we talk about this system center, that I will be able to share with you the skills and the knowledge and the work that I've done into helping you understand what you need to know about the design of this private cloud. Well, we're gonna talk about exactly what is system center and all of the components that make it up. So that's our goal is to kind of give you this preview of all of the different technologies we're gonna talk about throughout our course. So we're gonna start off first by having a discussion of what is system center. First of all, it is a suite of management tools. No longer can you purchase just one or two of the components. When you purchase system center, you're licensing it for the entire suite, although you can choose which ones you want to install, which of those components you'd like to look at or use. What our goal here is gonna be is to take you through, as I said, a preview. So you have an understanding about what each of these components does as we get into each of these modules that are gonna talk about them and how we use them in the management of the cloud. So we'll have our discussions about operations manager, the configuration manager, the service manager, orchestrator, the data protection manager and the virtual machine manager. Now as I was saying, the system center is a suite of components licensed as the entire suite and it's up to you what you use. We no longer have to go through the hassles like we did in some of the history of managing multiple servers or multiple databases like we did before. It wasn't unusual if you were running something like the system management server, SMS and trying to deal with that and then figuring out how can you use configuration manager at the same time to help you or can they talk to each other? Can we make them work or do I have to have different administrators in the different databases and the different servers and have to take my single job that I'm trying to accomplish and find a way to split it out and to utilize these different technologies and that's what we went through. Microsoft has spent a lot of time fully integrating this product together. It's not what it was when they first imagined some of these products, some of them up to eight years ago. So now what we're gonna look at as we talk about it is how they work together and what they do as individual components and hopefully give you at least the preview of the cross integration benefits that we have now with this as a suite of components. The main focus I would say of the operations manager is monitoring of the ongoing health of whatever it is that you have running within your network. Whether it's looking at the cloud, looking at the components of a cloud, just watching a couple of servers, it's designed to basically help us as we focus on the health of our systems and the health means more than just an outage, it means poorly performing as well. So it goes by the name system center operations manager and basically as an organization when you lay down that base configuration of your systems and keep them patched and updated, operation manager's job is to just monitor the ongoing health as well as the applications that are installed on the systems. What basically you could think of is for all of these servers that we may be wanting to monitor, whether it's a server, maybe it's a Hyper-V host that I usually draw a little bit longer with the indication that there's virtual machines running inside, whether it's an individual computer component, maybe it's the switch that they're all connected to, maybe the routers, the network devices. It is a full, as I said, suite just of itself tool of being able to monitor everything that's out there. It's crucial that we are able to track and be proactive and to have something that can react to issues as they occur. We can create specific rules that look at normal operations and if something falls out of the standards, at minimum somebody gets notified. What you're gonna see is that as you put operations manager together, there are many components, but it does start with the first root management server. And you may, depending on the size of your network, have other management servers that are assisting and working on the capabilities of this process of gathering information. But I wanna focus, just as I said, to give you this preview of what happens. So RMS is gonna work as you're gonna discover by installing software on all of these devices that they call an agent. The agent's job is to return information as it detects problems, as it's monitoring processes, as it's monitoring the hardware, and it logs that information to the RMS server. As an administrator, you, of course, have the ability to connect into this thing through a console screen, whether the console is directly on the server or sitting at your desktop. If you're out in the world of the internet with the web, you can connect to this thing through that internet to an web-based server that can run a web console so that you can still look and maintain all of the information that's happening. But as you take this, and just as an example of what RMS can do, it can be programmed to respond to events that occur, whether it's an actual event or if it's an alert, if it's a status change, it can respond to these things to help us understand when there's a problem in the network and to help us with as quick a remediation as we can. As a matter of fact, we did say you can create a series of rules. We could have a rule that was designed to detect, let's say that a service has stopped, and if the service has stopped, we can write a rule that says to go out there and go turn that service back on so that we can get that operational again if we wanted to. Now that's a very simplistic form of what this service and server can do. As I said, one of the other rules may have been to go hit an exchange server and send out emails to those people who need to know about things that have gone wrong. So there's plenty of options that we can use with RMS. It can even look for that person who is at home. As I said, if I had to go through the internet, we have gateway services that you can use to still have that agent talk to the gateway and then relay your information to the RMS server so we can manage those things that are remote from our network and do so securely over an unsecure internet connectivity. This has, of course, its own database to store information that you may use to create your baselines to be able to know what the norms are so you can detect and determine with your rules as to whether or not you're out of the normals or the normal settings. So I haven't, of course, hit every single key point that there is with the operations manager, but hopefully I've given you kind of like I was wanting an overview of what this does for us. And it's important that we have that overview because at the end of this, when I talk about each of these products, I'll try to give you kind of a focus about how the different components within this suite can interact with each other. When it comes to configuration manager, as it says its job is to help you with imaging, updating, updating programs, updating settings, upgrading the capabilities, system patch management. It really is, I guess you could say, that it starts by laying down an image of an operating system. And we can do that on a bare metal machine and we can adjust those images as we send them out there. It can work with servers or clients. So as we think about how well configuration manager can manage things that we need to do and to put automation in there, then it makes sense to use its technologies for that purpose, just that automation. So as I said, I can throw down an image and suddenly have servers getting up and ready to run. Those images can be customized. Customized meaning that after I put the image on there, I can then add other programs if I wanted to. Over time, I can be used as a server to maintain my updates, my hot fixes, my service packs. It's a great tool that helps us in being able to get consistency. The goal here is to, as I said, to add that automation so that these things are done, either scheduled or on a manual basis. But one of the great things is, when it comes to doing updates, as an example, who says that it can only do one of these at a time? Its goal is to do whichever systems, whatever updates, whatever upgrades you want and to be able to hit more than one. If a system is asleep and its network card is capable of a wake on LAN, I should say the configuration manager will reach out there, wake that machine up, do the updates that it needs, let it go back down into its hibernation or completely turned off state. Now, we do that through the way in which we configure the rules. As I said, it will continually patch and update systems, gives you the ability to push out new software, you can make some of your rules based on specific templates and guidelines. The other thing that it does for us is it keeps track of our inventory, keeping track of what we have out there as far as hardware, keeping track of what operating systems we have, keeping track to see that you have the proper licenses for the software that are out there so you don't find yourself in any type of the civil or criminal violations through piracy of software. As I said, it has remote control capabilities, it gives you the ability to make sure that everything is being maintained and again, it does so usually with a series of agents that are involved so that we can have that ongoing communications with the configuration manager. It is important to know that again you can have many configuration manager servers that are out there working for a larger enterprise. Some may be remotely connected so it's easier to have staging computers where maybe your updates, your images and everything else are put closer to where they're needed. But again, the configuration manager is a way of making, I guess we could say, an easier task of being able to do the work that we would normally have to do on a day by day basis. It'll take care of those schedules for us, it will keep our centers up to date and it will, of course, hopefully add consistency and reduce the potential of having errors in the way in which we install software or updates. Well, so far we've talked a lot about tools that are going out there and doing updates or gathering information and so here's one with service manager. That's about management. Management of the processes and change control. Now, we can make an argument that service management can actually make changes for you but not on its own and we're gonna talk a little bit about how it all relates together but that's, its goal is to help us when it comes down to the actual management of whatever it is that we may see like an incident. An incident that could be reported by a person could be entered in manually, could have been discovered automatically of problems and there's a little bit of difference between an incident and a problem and we'll talk about that as we get into this portion of what we're doing and of course, as I said, change to be able to help us with the planning of changes. So when we think of this service manager as I've been doing, just put it here in the middle of my network, the goal of service manager is to basically allow users at one point if we want to to be able to connect and report an incident or a problem that they can talk about on outage or something that's poorly performing. Maybe they've been trying to log on to this server and they're not getting anywhere. And that can then lead to the notification of our admin staff or the IT department to let them know about what the issues are and to be able to start a process of being able to go through and actually figure out what's wrong. Now this is the one probably of all of these that I'm gonna talk the least of at the moment but you're gonna find out that this service manager is really kind of in the middle of all of the things that systems we can do. Of course, there's always gonna be a related database that we use to be able to store the information of the jobs that we're doing. But the big thing about service management is that as we go through an incident or a problem, besides it being reported, let's say, or even change, then it can be worked on to plan. By planning on it, you can associate a variety of knowledge-based articles. You can upload other files, maybe a diagram, maybe a white paper that discusses potential problems or potential issues. It goes through an approval process. The approval process is to finally basically sign off on the plan and then, of course, it can give us the action plan that we need to take care of this, whatever the item is, the work item, I guess is the right term. It'll help us with that action plan that we can develop, we can follow it and then, of course, when we're done, we can then report what's been accomplished. And so it takes us through that in actually many more steps. But it is important that we understand that it is just that change control, that process management to add actual management capabilities into our system, into managing and maintaining our cloud. Now, Orchestrator is what they call a runbook automation tool. It gives us either a text-based or graphical-based overview of, let's just say, steps of work to be done. And what that means is, basically, that as it sounds, as an Orchestrator, we are going to use this to help get things done that none of the other system center products might be able to do just right out of the box. We can create specific steps, specific workflows that might not be normal if maybe you have some specialized process or you need to launch a script. And so what you're gonna be finding here is a runbook designer. I'm not even gonna draw a picture of a network. And on this runbook designer, you'll have a list of items here that you can click and drag onto the screen. And you could say, all right, let's start here by waiting for an alert. Ah, I see, now I'm gonna give it away. Where's that alert gonna come from? Well, it could come from Operations Manager. It could come from the Service Manager. It could be something that we initiated on ourselves. And after that alert is done, it can then say, all right, there's my start. That's what I do. Let's say that the alert is, like I said before, some process or service has stopped on a system. Then we can have another step that could ask the question, is that service actually running or not? If it's a no, then we might say, all right, then let's start that service. If it's a yes, then maybe we'd say stop it. Maybe there's a problem with it. And as the next step, come back over here and start it up again. And so what you can do is you are orchestrating a series of steps, step by step by instructions that will actually go out and proactively do these actions that we're requesting it to do. So, you know, it's not just as easy as, as I said, starting a process or a service. Like I said, it could launch a script. It could process a report. For that matter, we could have it move data from one system to another. Orchestrator is designed to help us come up with a way of taking care of our tasks through the automation process. That we set these up and we can run them whenever it is called for. Whether it's gonna do this all on its own automatically, as I just talked about with this service starting or having a problem, or whether or not it's based on any number of things that could start this entire process. They used to call it Apollos, but now, of course, it's called Orchestra. And it is a big part of this, of the entire system center suite. They like to tell us that it is an end-to-end solution because it can work with multiple different platforms. As I said, if I created a process to move data from one machine to another, then that means Orchestra is reaching out to the first machine, telling it to issue some command to transfer data to another machine. And of course, again, I'm making a very simple workflow. In fact, they actually encourage your workflows to be somewhat short, so that doesn't get so complicated that it's a little harder to fathom. They have looping capabilities. They have weighting capabilities for the logic of the steps that you need to go through. And that's what it's designed to do. It's, again, it's something that does have to really work with the other system center products. And I hope to be able to diagram that for you and talk about how they can kind of all interrelate, at least to some extent, because the goal, again, is to give you this preview so you kind of understand what this tool is doing when we begin to have our discussions about how it works within the cloud. Well, I'm gonna draw a big hard drive. Data Protection Manager is just that. It's a tool with a specialized backup and recovery capability. And what Data Protection Manager does, and which is really kind of cool about this, is it's a central location of being able to set up backups. So I can have many databases, many servers out here that I'm going to be doing a backup of, exchange servers, file servers, and it was designed to work with these different types of servers specifically. So F for file server. And it does work like so many other things, is that we install an agent on these devices. And that agent's job is to be able to interact with the Data Protection Manager. And what it can do for me is it can issue orders to, let's say, backup a file. And when we back up that file, that file you're gonna learn could, or the files could go to another disk somewhere, which you could then transfer to tape. Don't know if I can draw one of those old fashioned cassette tapes. You could go from one disk to another disk and then send it off into a cloud service that handles the backup. These backups you'll find out can be automated to every 15 minutes if you wanted to. Or as infrequently as you want it to be able to do the backups. And the backups are efficient. You're gonna find out that maybe I have this one really big file inside of this database. And so the first time it's slow because I'm backing up this entire file. And once that file's been backed up and somebody comes and makes a couple changes, I only need to go and take those little changes and merge them onto the original file so that I have them up to date with what's occurring. And that's, again, another one of those great things that can help us. Now we know that the goal here in backing up the data is to fit with some sort of business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan. Or just to protect you from the loss of information whether accidental or malicious. And that's why we call it data protection. It acts as a backup to clients, to server file systems as I said, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, Hyper-V, the actual guest sessions on Hyper-V if I want to. And it does it on a continuous basis. And I may have so many machines that I may have many of these DPM servers out there. But as I said again, it's central management. I can manage them all from one point and have them all being responsible for the communications and performing the backups. It's also something that will do restores quite well. So if I did back up the information as you saw my arrow going this direction, I can restore. I can restore to a certain point in time if I want to. I can also do just a file type of restore if that's all I want. I can even allow a user who is just sitting on their workstation who knows that they're working with files that they had backed up and they can make a self-service request for the permission to restore a file and DPM would help them if you get granted that permission to be able to do that simple restore. So that's where it is in the world of protection and of course of being able to restore. And it's more than just a restore of a file or of a folder but you can in order to a point in time but we can restore all the way to a completely dead system if we wanted to. It was designed to do all of it right together. The system state if you need to gather the files and folders or whatever it is that your goal is as far as managing these backups. So it's a really kind of cool tool. I can't wait to talk to you a little bit more about it as we get into it so you have a better understanding about how it goes through the backup process and how efficient it is in the backup process but it is really I think one of my favorite tools out of all of the system center. It's always operations manager as well but just for the I think the big changes that we had in the technology that this is just a fantastic part of the suite. Well the virtual machine manager it says it's a Hyper-V host management. So you know I've drawn already a little Hyper-V host. I just call it a host. And on that host maybe several virtual machines that are running that we need to manage. Maybe there are some slots open so for room for memory and the rest of it. And of course there are the understanding that we may have many different hosts out there that we need to work with. And so the goal of VMM is from a central location to be able to administratively work with all of these different hosts. It'll also work with the storage area network in the background that a lot of these images may be running on or virtual machines may be stored on or at least their virtual hard drives. It has its own database for its own configuration commands so that we can move the VMM server anywhere that we want it to. And what this virtual machine manager can do is just really help facilitate all aspects of the virtual environment. We have a library that we'll talk about that we can store virtual machines in. And with very few commands we can go to the library, pull out a virtual machine and have it automatically install on another host. Or if one of the hosts fails I can then take that virtual machine that may have its virtual hard drive in the storage area network and repoint it to another host so I can bring that machine back online. So I have a faster recovery. Or if I know I want to take a host down for maintenance I can make a virtual machine move from one location to another we call a live migration. One of the coolest things though but I think now with 2012 is that we can gather the components that we want to put together and tell the VMM that we want to make this a private cloud. And the virtual machine manager's gonna go out there and take all of those components that we listed and make it become a cloud service that we can manage as that one service. Like I said, it just goes on and on with the capabilities of some of the stuff that is available to us. And its job is to take over from you having to go to each individual host or to remote management of each host and having to manually take care of a lot of the issues that I've just talked about. I almost don't know where to begin in talking about putting it all together but I'll start with the server. And this server is, let's say, crucial to us and it's hosting an application. And in fact, let's say it's hosting a web page. And that web page, and you'll see this diagram so many times as we go through here, they have some servers that are operating some business logic for us. Maybe some of them are connecting to banks for credit cards. And others may be something specific for, I don't know, shipping products to people. And then in the background, I have a database that is keeping track of all of my transactions. All of the customer orders, maybe it's, I've just suddenly developed a distributed application. And all of these pieces need to be able to work for us and if they don't, then we have some problems. So one of the first things we talked about was the operations manager. Operations manager working with the agents installed on each of these components and reporting to operation manager will keep track of the performance, the counters on these devices. But it can also test applications for me as well. And it can test it as the server itself that it's on or can test it as a user. And we'll talk about some of those things. And of course, we're waiting for the potential of hearing about some sort of an alert or an event that's gonna trigger an action. Okay, well operations manager, let's say got an alert. One of the things I could do with that operations manager is send the alert off to my service manager. The service manager can then send my email off to people. And maybe my service manager will go out and register that alert over here with orchestra. An orchestra may have a run book that talks about what we need to do to be able to fix this particular problem. And so it can start going and doing whatever configuration commands are required to try to bring a service or a system back up online. And so right there, what I wanted to show you is a little bit of the interaction between these tools that we have. We could also, I said, have users. So send in an email to start a service plan, which may start something with the orchestra to handle whatever the issues are. Maybe orchestra realizes at some point it needs to work with a virtual machine manager to move a virtual machine from one location to the next so that with that virtual machine manager can then reach out and go to all the hosts into the virtual images or go to its library and start that process. If VMM suddenly encounters an error, it too can send an alert off to operations manager, which may, again, trigger something as a new service that's going out there. We could start a change request process here on the service manager. And that change request, again, may trigger something in orchestra to try to automatically implement the change. Or it may just start us in the process of being able to do real change management, which is to go through the steps of gathering information, of getting the supporting papers, of documentations, results of lab tests and the sign off process. All of those are what we can get out of this system. VMM may also rely on something like the data protection manager to tell all of the hosts on its hyper or to tell the hosts to maybe start doing backups of all of their virtual machines. And again, if there's a problem with that, we can see this, again, report errors. And nothing said that if there was an error that I couldn't report it directly to the service manager because I certainly can. And so again, I hope what you're seeing here is that there is an interaction and I haven't even gotten into all of the interactions between these product lines that are within the suite. But they all can bring a benefit. They can all help keep this network at its peak performance for us and to help us in recovering from so many different things that may have potentially been a slowdown or even an outage. But they do communicate. They work side by side with each other. Not installed on the same server, certainly. Oh, and the best part is, they're almost all of them are gonna report their information off to a data warehouse. And as I said, that data warehouse can then publish a widget that you can put on your dashboard or it may publish something to a SharePoint server so that people who are in the same SharePoint site could look at that information and have a good idea of how, you know, their particular interests are being served by the software or the hardware that's being monitored. And that's kind of what I mean by putting it all together. There certainly is a lot more to it. But the goal here is just to make sure that you understand that they truly do coexist and interact with each other. And they can through the, as complex of a situation as you want, you can add automation to try to recover from any potential damages that could occur in the network.